Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to electronic messaging between two entities and specifically to sending messages from one entity to another that leverages information stored by one of the entities and contextual information associated with the message to identify an intended unknown message recipient.
Description of the Related Art
In the medical industry it is often the case that patients see many different physicians, medical assistants, nurses, specialists, etc., in the course of receiving services. Thus, for instance, a patient may initially consult a primary care physician about an ailment, be referred out for tests and imaging activities to one or several different institutions and be referred to one or more specialists, for additional services. Here, in order to provide optimal service for a patient, all caregivers that provide services to a patient need to be able to easily communicate amongst themselves. One way for caregivers to communicate between themselves is via an electronic messaging system.
Typical electronic messaging systems allow one user to send a message to a second user by addressing the message to a specified address associated with the second user. For example, in an e-mail system, each individual user has their own specific address. The e-mail address is usually in the form of: username@domainname. Thus, a user of GMAIL.COM with a user name of “john.smith” would have an e-mail address of “john.smith@gmail.com”.
It is known that an administrator can establish a single e-mail address that can be routed to a number of different recipients by an e-mail server. For example, a company might have a single customer service e-mail address such as customer.service@company.com. A server associated with the customer service e-mail address forwards messages received at the customer service address to a number of different e-mail accounts of employees responsible for monitoring customer service questions. The message is thus distributed to several customer service employees indiscriminately. The company can then use the customer service e-mail address in its product literature so that questions from customers or the general public can be handled without concerns about changes at the company itself: employee turn over, vacations, etc. Furthermore, the actual recipients of the messages can remain generally unknown to the sender at the time the sender sends the electronic message.
While the single e-mail address concept works well for routing messages to a group of intended recipients, unfortunately there is no easy way to use a similar single e-mail address to route a message to one of a plurality of possible recipients. For instance, in a case where an ear, nose and throat (ENT) specialist intends to route a message to a patient's primary care physician (PCP) and does not know the PCP's name or e-mail address, there is no easy way for the ENT specialist to address an e-mail to a single PCP address and have the messaging system deliver the message to the patient's PCP. Similarly, where a patient's PCP intends to route a message to the patient's ENT specialist and does not know who the specialist is or the specialist's e-mail address, currently there is no way for the PCP to address a message to a single address and have the message automatically delivered to the patient's ENT specialist. This problem is exacerbated in cases where patients are serviced by many different physicians and across unaffiliated entities where familiarity between all caregivers and addressing conventions is highly unlikely.